I ran across a trailer recently in the Frankfurter Allgemeinefor a new release touching on Lenten themes: 14 scenes corresponding to the 14 Stations of the Cross. Hence the film’s title, Kreuzweg, which is German for the Stations of the Cross. I’ve come to expect a lot from German films over the years, but if this one is to cut the mustard it will have to take some unexpected turns.

The trailer: Scene 1) Amicable priest gives old-school rendering of the snares of the devil, who appearing in many different guises leads us to perdition, that is, unless we have recourse to God’s help. Scene 2) 14 year old Maria, taking this to heart, won’t participate in gym class with rock music, whose “satanic rhythms” she objects to - whereupon she gets interrogated by her teacher and mocked by her peers. Scene 3) Maria gets excoriated by her mother when she timidly announces she wants to sing gospel music - to the peril, as her mother puts it, of her immortal soul. The voice-over intimates a tragic outcome. Trailer ends.

Sigh. Another assault on traditional Catholicism? But how exactly does today’s crop of Germans claim to know what traditional Catholicism even looks like, let alone name its potential pitfalls? German Catholicism has been under the spell of secular ideology for generations, thanks in part to the generous church tax which has effectually incentivized lax teaching. Of those who still identify as Catholic, few even attend mass, and of those, very few genuinely struggle with the full content of Catholic teachings.

The voice-over tells us that Maria belongs specifically to the “Paulsbrüder”, which we should understand as the real-world “Piusbrüder”, that is, the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), a traditionalist faction that broke from Rome in the 1970’s. It’s hard to get a sense of how large the SSPX exactly is, but in Germany they do have one seminary and some amount of the 600,000 lay adherents worldwide. In all, a small presence. Reading further between the lines, it’s not a stretch to see the Paulsbrüder as a stand-in for anyone with a traditional orientation towards Catholicism.

And this is compounded by the pervasive German phobia of Sekten (sects), which for them includes anything lying outside of widely acknowledged institutions. Many bristle at Tom Cruise movies due to his involvement in Scientology, for example.

Er kaempft unter vielen Flaggen, the priest says of the devil, he campaigns, or battles, under many flags. Or, we might say, his only loyalty is to destruction. Yes, we should add, even within the life of religion itself, warping the universal vocation to holiness into a channel for humiliating power struggles. If anything, the mother’s heartless rebuke vindicates priest’s teaching on evil. (Grant that I not so much seek to be understood but to understand, right?). But here we are prompted to see it as a consequence of that teaching.

Typecasting traditional religion as intolerant and psychically warping? Blurring the broad lines between lived religion and maternal abuse? Playing the old religion-as-repression card? Insinuating that it is reference to positive evil, and not evil itself, that degrades human nature? Why would the Germans need a movie like this at all? It’s not like this is a contended issue in secular Germany anymore: religion there is passé. Why re-vanquish an already vanquished enemy - except in order to go ahead and do what you were going to do anyway, but now mit gutem Gewissen? Or rather, with an even clearer conscience - because, now it would appear, the old enemy wasn't just outdated but downright evil. If there were such a thing. Again, I certainly hope the movie turns out to be more probing than the trailer promises. Knowing German cinema, which routinely blows me away (I still can’t get over Der Untergang), there is certainly a good chance it will.

An accolade: a piece like this, in its compressed mixture of information and wide-ranging interpretation, reminds me of the German tradition of the "Denkbild," practiced most famously by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Theodor Adorno.

A quibble: Is there really such a thing as "traditional Catholicism"? After all, it's not like there was one homogenous, unchanging set of practices and beliefs that was merrily carrying on until something like "the Enlightenment" or "modernity" came and ruined the party. Catholicism has always been fractured and contested. There have always been differences created by the inflections of culture and language, and by the distances imposed by centuries. There have always been theological and doctrinal quarrels. There have always been tensions between Rome and the periphery, and between the beliefs and practices of elites and those of common people. I suspect the religion of Augustine, Mary Queen of Scots, and the anonymous Spanish peasant circa 1850 are not uniform embodiments of a singular "traditional Catholicism."